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Late 2021: Bic Sport rebranded Tahe and this boat is a Breeze HP2. Price unchanged

French paddleboat, board and ball-point dinghy manufacturer BIC Sport joined the full dropstitch (FDS) market a few of years back with three models of Yakkair Full HP: the 1, 2 and le trois. Made in Vietnam, the HP2 goes for around £1200 in the UK under the new for 2021 Tahe brand.

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The ‘Full’ is an important addition to the name which gets emblazoned on the hull, because the previous Yakkair models (above right) were just called HP 1, 2 and maybe 3. They had a DS floor between regular round side tubes.
The old models didn’t really jump out off my IK radar; they looked too much like some Advanced Elements IKs. But looking at the inset diagram above, it looks like they tried to address the flat-floor with a keel tube tucked underneath the outer shell.

On the water under the weight of a paddler it supposedly deformed to produce a double concave profile – a bit like the Kxone/DS Kajak AirTrek floors – and which looks like it will work better than a totally flat floor. Even with a skeg at the back, this barge-like flat floor common to DS IKs does make me wonder how they’d handle or track.
Bic owner Robbo has a variety of slip-on skegs and for this run he selected a medium in orange.

You get two clip-in SoT contoured-foam seats which have a well-braced backrest but, with bases an inch or two thick, won’t raise the butt above the ankles to give an efficient paddling posture, IMHO. Many IKs are like this out of the box, but raising or replacing the seat base is dead easy. I put my shoes under my Sunny seat: much better, but really you can’t beat an inflatable seat base like a packraft seat.

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For solo use it looks possible to position the front seat back to the next D-rings, except there’s nowhere to clip the foot brace, which on the Yakkair are just a couple of padded straps. You could maybe use the front seat mounts. A good way to make a firmer and more effective foot brace is to slip a bit of 4-inch ø plastic drainpipe over the strap (right).

At each end you have two chunky carry handles as well as those fairly useless elasto-nets so common to many IKs. What would you put there that wouldn’t be more secure and more accessible lashed down by your feet or behind you? Not needed today, but the Yakkety Yak has a dinky slip-in spray visor up front to keep the splash out.

Talking of splash, I was keen to see the notorious side-floor join I wrote about. Sure enough, the Yakk’s floor is glued to the hull casing floor beneath and taped the side panels. But not all the way and so water and crud will run into the cavities at each end (below left) and then run down behind the tape along the sides. You could get rid of most of it by standing the boat on its end and opening the drain at the stern. And if you think there’s a lot of grit and other debris in there, hose from the top and let it run down the inside edges and out the drain. As for drying: that will take as long as it takes.

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Sat inside, the boat is over half a metre wide because so much space is saved by the flat DS panels. But measured at 87cm wide (33.5″), the FHP 2 looks a bit on the wide side. Many FDS IKs look the same but have various widths: the HP2 seems about average. The much cheaper Decathlon Itiwit X500 is an unnerving 64cm, but even it seemed pretty wide when I looked at one in the shop. My Sunny was some 20cm less wide – and that’s with round tubes!

Flipped over, the bow looks a lot better formed than a typical full-tube IK, perhaps to compensate for the flatter floor. It’s actually a solid plastic moulding so should be immune to wear as the boat comes in to shore. But coming back down the Adur into the wind and against the flow, E & L had some trouble tracking straight. The two of them combined probably weighed less than me and with the featherlight L in front, the lifted bow was not cutting down through the water – the trim was out. Swapping seats with the heavier E up front would have fixed that, but it was thought the more powerful paddler should be at the back. Kayaking lore seems to agree, though two-up in my IKs (same-ish length) my generous mass is better distributed up front. To me it’s obvious: better to have the larger mass (my torso) towards the centre of the boat, not the stern.

Watching the Yakk navigate 20-km of flatwater for a few hours didn’t me inspire to even ask for a go, far less to own one. Used to being snuggly jammed into IKs & Ps, the canoe-like width and low seats put me off and set-up was without footrests would have made it too much like sitting on a log. L & E were first-timers in this boat afaik and initially found it tippy though soon got accustomed (they looked pretty relaxed).

The quality of assembly certainly corresponded with a four-figure IK and it sure looks less bloaty than a Decathlon Itiwit we met – the IK sales hit of 2020. I suspect this image is the attraction to many FDS buyers, but for me the water and grit-trapping cavities would add extra maintenance, even if it wouldn’t be that hard to fabricate and glue in a PVC cone to seal them off for good. Then you could simply rinse, drain, deflate, wipe off and dry the Yakkair like a regular tubeless IK. And the other drawbacks: seats; footrests; thigh straps are easily added. The you’d have a stiff and spacious tourer with great paddler ergos.

New Yakkair HP1 owner, Kevin A, adds:
Having just bought a Bic Yakkair Full HP1 to replace an ageing Walker Bay Airis which has become porous after about ten years of excellent service, I was very interested to read this review and I thought I would add some early impressions of my own boat.  So far, I have only had it on the water once because I have ordered a new combo paddle which can be a kayak paddle, a canoe paddle or a SUP paddle – I generally prefer using a single canoe paddle but the one which I have been using for years is a bit too short for the wider new boat.  You mention the width of the HP1 in your review and you say that you prefer a narrower boat but, for me, the extra width was part of the attraction.  I’m not sure yet about how it affects the stability and handling but, tbh, I just prefer the appearance of the wider boat even though, as you suggest, it does make a footrest essential so that you can brace yourself better – in my other boat, I was held fairly firmly at the thighs by the narrow interior.  The footrest which came with my boat seems to be a bit more substantial than the one you describe in your review.
Looking around at the various marketing pictures, I think some of the details of the package are a bit variable and maybe the footrest falls into that category.  But the biggest difference I have spotted is the style of the carry bag for the boat and I have to say that the carry bag which I have been supplied with is fantastic.  It is superbly well made and looks like a fairly upmarket piece of luggage – on the occasions when I take the boat on public transport I will no longer feel quite so conspicuous (the downside – there’s always a downside! – is that the bag itself adds weight to the whole package).  The real surprise about the carry bag is that it swallows up the entire rig – hull, paddle, pump and seat and there is still room for all the normal bits and pieces of personal kit.  The downside of that, of course, is that it is very big and only just about manageable by a single person – there is definitely no chance that it will ever be carried on my back using the excellent quality backpack straps which are part of the bag’s construction (I’m seriously tempted to cut the straps off).
The only area which I still have to work out is, as you say, how to deal with getting the water out of the joints between the three panels.  I’m not sure that the material itself will absorb much moisture and I’m hoping that removing the end plug and propping the boat up on end for a decent length of time (half an hour?) will allow the joints to drain pretty thoroughly – if necessary, I will have to re-inflate the boat at some point in order to ensure that it is completely dry.  By the way, I think that the so-called self-bailing drains are only really intended for use in seriously white water when the boat is in danger of filling up completely – in those conditions, it would be quite normal for the boat to have quite a lot of water sloshing around but the self-bailers would help to keep the level down (I only ever paddle on flat water so I have no idea how effective the self-bailers are in practice).
Happy paddling!